Tvtropes Conlang

Sounds good to me!

I'm ready to help start this back up if anyone else wants to keep up this thread.

Never be without a Hat! Hot means heat. I don't care if your usage dates to 1300, it's my word, not yours. My Pm box is open.

Let's do this thing!

We need a list of things that need doing, I think.

Now I've got this image of Robin's secret childhood love affair with Mr. T. - Idler 20

It will be awesome once we get the grammar fleshed out enough to start writing example sentences. I like 'hir-' for 'heroic', though maybe we should pick a consonant with a strong voiced/unvoiced distinction so we can distinguish 'heroic' from merely 'nice', a la fil-/vil-. I also like mul- for kill, though there should also be a distinction between 'kill' (a generic act, without a real moral connotation, can act on animals, plants, humans) and 'murder' (a crime, implying unjustified action against a human who did not attack you first and with whose army you are not at war).

Shinigan (Naruto fanfic)

If we're using "fil-" and "vil-" for "bad" and "evil", then maybe we could use voiced consonants to exaggerate the meaning of a word. So:

"cin-" = "nice" "jin-" = "heroic".

EDIT: in case you aren't sure, the letter c makes the "ch" sound.

edited 27th Jun '11 2:25:24 PM by cjpdk

Okay its died down a lot here, so i've decided to post my idea for pronouns. Each pronoun is comprised of a string of letters, and each individual letter carries a meaning:

Person:

1st - (nothing) 2nd - P- 3rd - B-

Gender:

Male - w Female - r Neuter - y

Number:

Single - a Plural - i Infintie/Uncountable - u

Status as troper:

Troper - t Not Troper - f Cannot be troper - v

And onto this, add the nooun class suffixes -ya, -a, -e, -o, and -u.

So "Byutya" is 3rd person, neuter, infinite/uncountable, troper, and deity

"Rifa" is 1st person, females, pluiral, not troper, and human

So what do you think?

edited 12th Jul '11 3:58:57 AM by cjpdk

Giving specific meaning to individual phonemes like that immediately raises my "artificial language" hackles, since natural languages are rarely-to-never so neat. Of course, this isn't necessarily a bad thing, depending on how natural you intend the language to appear.

If we wanted to go with those pronouns, I've got a load questions about structure: would it be incorrect to change the order of the morphemes, i.e. could I (female, troper, human) use 'tara' instead of 'rata'? And does changing the order change the meaning? What about if changing order violates phonological constraints? Could you leave out one or more letters and still have a valid pronoun—could I decide I don't want to broadcast my gender all over the internet and just call myself 'ata'?

I do like this pronoun scheme. As far as 'naturalness' of language goes—it's based on T Vtropes, it's not going to be all that natural to start with. The ability to leave out certain phonemes sounds good. Is it guaranteed that the pronoun will always end with a consonant to tack the more generic noun endings onto?

Shinigan (Naruto fanfic)

Thanx for the responses(!), i'll answer some of your questions:

"would it be incorrect to change the order of the morphemes, i.e. could I (female, troper, human) use 'tara' instead of 'rata'?... What about if changing order violates phonological constraints? "

Changing the order could probably be allowed, but it might lead to phonological problems; in the order i gave, the morphemes are arranged (stop)-(approximant)-(vowel)-(consonant), and then the endings. Rearranging the morphemes may create illegal words.

"And does changing the order change the meaning? "

No, because no phonemes are repeated, so changing the order wouldn't lead to confusion.

"Could you leave out one or more letters and still have a valid pronoun—could I decide I don't want to broadcast my gender all over the internet and just call myself 'ata'? "

Like in Esperanto, the neuter (in this instance "-y-") is used for both genders.

"Is it guaranteed that the pronoun will always end with a consonant to tack the more generic noun endings onto? "

Yes, because the morpheme immediately before the endings is the "troper status", which cannot be left out.

• sweeps off tumbleweed*

It's been a while, but I think there's a chance of reviving this. Fistly, we need to agree on some grammar. Here's a list of things that may be important:

• Verb agreement with subject, maybe even direct object and indirect object (this does actually occur in Basque).
• Aspect marking (arguably more important than tense).
• Distinguishing evidentality (it WILL happen, it MIGHT happen, it PROBABLY will happen...).
• Methods of negation.
• Forming Y/N questions.
• Subjunctive; Y/N?
• Passive voice (necessary when there is a fixed word order).
• Levels of politeness, as in Japanese.
• Grammatical gender.
• Adjective agreement with nouns.
• Particles.
• Correlatives; a strictly regular system (Esperanto), an irregular "system" (English, French), or a completely literal system (Chinese, I think).

There are loads of possible answers to these questions, and I suspect that some of these have already been answered. In any case, I shall submit my ideas, in order:

• Not necessary, but possibly helpful. Object agreement is probably a bit too extreme, though.
• Particles (like the Chinese "le", completed action) would cover this effectively.
• IMO, an extremely good idea.
• An affix to the verb would cover this, but as The Language Construction Kit attests, there are loads of methods of doing this.
• A simple particle (Esperanto "Chu", French "Est-ce que") is best.
• It would free up word order, but if this is no concern, then don't bother.
• Either this, or a topic particle (Quechua "qa", Japanese "wa").
• A distinction along the lines of French "tu/vous" is a nice idea, but I don't think we need as many as in Japanese.
• Would be fine if the classes were more literal than in some languages; otherwise, no.
• See 4 sentences previously.
• Apart from those previously suggested, the adpositions are important.
• The table of correlatives is a neat idea, but as can be seen here:http://www.zompist.com/kitespo.html, and here:http://www.xibalba.demon.co.uk/jbr/ranto/#j, there are some flaws.

Some responses would be appreciated. Thanx for (maybe) reading!

Just wanted to pitch something in to you guys:

A while ago, for my own conlanging, I designed a spreadsheet for conlangs. It's not (and likely never will be) entirely finished, but it's got enough guides in it that it ought to be helpful. Want a copy?

I'm convinced that our modern day analogues to ancient scholars are comedians. -0dd1

Regarding agreement and so forth—I don't think it's necessary; it doesn't really convey any extra information. Perhaps we could have some sort of marker for 'levels of truth' with 'certain', 'probable', 'possible', 'unlikely', 'untrue'; you could have particles to put in declarative sentences that mean the obvious thing, then the same particles in imperative sentences could mark how strongly the speaker desires the listener to comply.

Also, later someone should totally write a Tengwar mode for it. Because that would be awesome. This is just a matter of orthography, so not really relevant or necessary until the language is finished.

Shinigan (Naruto fanfic)

Yes, please.

Ooh, that sounds neat. I like the idea of levels of truth!

Never be without a Hat! Hot means heat. I don't care if your usage dates to 1300, it's my word, not yours. My Pm box is open.

Regarding "levels of truth": Is a particle really necessary? I think a simple adjective is more flexible, allowing you to say things like "a probable event", "an event which is probable", etc. Also, it might lead to an ambiguity if you tried to ask "Is this event probable?", since it might instead parse as "Is this probable event true?".

edited 19th Oct '11 12:47:57 PM by Aniventerie

Need a tall, brawny fella to come by and inspect your pickle? Perhaps I may be this fella.

A particle wouldn't be necessary; it's true that an adjective could mean the same thing. The question is one of whether the idea of conveying truthfulness is important enough to the language to be part of its grammar or not. I personally would say it is.

Shinigan (Naruto fanfic)

Just my $0.02. I'm still worried about flexibility and the possible ambiguity, but then again I'm certainly no expert.

Also, here's my thoughts on Y/N questions:

This could easily be handled by a particle (I vote for somethig inspired by Mathematician's Answer) preceding a statement. As for answers, I like Toki Pona's method: For "yes", answer with the verb. For "no", answer with it's negation. Perhaps something along those lines?

Need a tall, brawny fella to come by and inspect your pickle? Perhaps I may be this fella.

That sounds pretty good—I think Irish already does that. (And if not Irish, a similar-sounding language from that area...)

In Arabic, for the present tense, to negate a verb you just add the word "no" (laa) to the front of the sentence.

And don't forget about languages like French that have a word for "yes" that is only used when answering negative questions (and for the word "if," but it's 4am over here ).

We could do a thing with the mathematician's answer, when the question features "or," which is notoriously difficult to translate. There could be a word that means "yes, both options apply," "yes, one of the options applies," "neither applies," and so on.

On the topic of particles, Arabic has "hal" that you can basically use for almost every question.

In the phonology chart, I assume each box goes voiceless then voiced, with the Latin character we would use for that particular phoneme underneath?

And I know this is digging back a bit, but wouldn't we need a schwa sound (central mid unround and lax) as an allophone of one of the vowels, probably one of the low front ones? Seems to me that people will naturally do that, especially since [a] is always so variable in languages anyway.

One Piece blog Beyond the Lampshade

Hello, I've been adding to the lexicon on a regular basis, but still find it hard to derive words from the roots, so I feel some extra derivation methods are needed for this artlang. This is a list of derivations needed, remember that any of these could be either Affixes or Clitics.

become nouns

become adjectives

become verbs

edited 30th Jan '12 5:23:12 AM by mullac

almost forgot! we also need prepositions and/or postpositions, here is a list of the main ones (once again, these are only suggestions, we can add/exclude some)

Spatial

Temporal Comparison Content Agent Instrument Purpose

Possessives Possessives are also something we need to get done! I need to go to a lecture now though, so here's the other wiki's article: [1]

edited 25th Jan '12 5:22:50 AM by mullac

I'm guessing this is all pretty dead now, but if there's anyone out there still interested, I've been mulling over an idea!

• This has been mentioned before, but what if we had dialects?

Looking through the language tropes, there seem to be several specific types of common con-langs:

• Black Speech, Common Tongue, Indo-European Alien Language, Language of Magic, Starfish Language
• The Vanilla Tropese could obviously be the Common Tongue, but we could have a Black Speech variation with lots of palatalisation and gutteral consonants.

The Language of Magic could have a latin-greek-esque sound (with maybe a bit of arabic, seeing as we get a lot of scientific and mystical words from semitic languages ie.'Abracadabra', 'Assassin', 'Alchemy', 'Algebra') And the Starfish language could have lots of clicks, whistles, extra places of articulation and nasal vowels as the norm. These are, of course, just ideas, feel free to turn them down or expand.

Also, could we possibly have a Fantastic Measuring System and Fantastic Slurs? Like: 'You are such a Cliché!' - a truly terrible thing to call a troper.

Possible sound changes for the Blackspeech could be debuccalisation, fortition, unpacking (of palatal consonants), Vowel breaking, apheresis, syncope, apocope, Nasalisation, Tonogenesis, Palatalisation, Velarisation, Diaresis, Rhotacism (converting consonants to r-sounds), Sigmatism, Rhinoglottophilia

edited 19th Oct '12 1:42:58 AM by mullac

BUMP because this needs to be preserved.

If you want any of my avatars, just Pm me I'd truly appreciate any avatar of a reptile sleeping in a Nice Hat Read Elmer Kelton books

aw. and this was really interesting too.

so much to do, and yet... here, it feels like one cannot do anything but lie here and sleep forever.

Can we get this started up again? I was actually planning on learning it.

Maybe borrow some grammar from Japanese, like possibly a word to express that a sentence is a question Also, bump. WE NEED TO THIS THREAD. I WANT A TRANSLATION OF "I was young once too" and "You're grounded." for when my futere kids insult me in tropese

edited 12th Nov '14 12:59:06 AM by SmartGirl333

I'm still interested so bump again

edited 31st Dec '15 11:35:44 PM by SmartGirl333

bump